It was a bloody week for New York City teenagers — with at least two killed and six others wounded in a rash of shootings and stabbings across the five boroughs.
The frightening spree of violence targeting the city’s youth unfolded over the course of two days, leaving a 16-year-old basketball lover shot dead on a SoHo street and a 17-year-old girl fatally knifed in the neck outside a Queens subway station.
“We need to do everything in our power to address violence in this city, especially among our young people,” said Pastor Edward Hinds, who worked with Mahki Brown, the teenage boy gunned down at an outdoor plaza on Spring Street near Varick Street Tuesday afternoon.
Brown, who attended nearby Broome Street Academy Charter High School blocks away — miles from his East Flatbush, Brooklyn home — played on a basketball team run by the 67th Precinct Clergy Council, a non-violence group also known as “The GodSquad.”
“Mahki was a very energetic, very vibrant young man,” Hinds told The Post on Friday.
“It’s a tragedy that now we have to be preparing for his funeral service.”
The teen — described as caring and respectful by friends and family — was playing “peacemaker” in a squabble between two of his fellow students when one of the girls involved called her brother for help, NYPD Chief of Detectives Joseph Kenny said Friday.
Two boys or men, who have not been publicly identified, then pulled up on a CitiBike, and one of them fired three times into a group of about 30 kids gathered at the plaza — hitting Brown twice, once in the head and once in the leg, Kenny said.
“He stepped in to break up the fight” and was killed, the chief noted.
Brown was one of two teens shot on Tuesday. The other, a 17-year-old boy blasted in the back on the grounds of an Upper West Side public housing development around 11:20 p.m., survived.
Also on Tuesday, three 15-year-old boys were slashed in two separate incidents in the Bronx and Brooklyn, and survived.
That bloodshed was followed by a pair of 15-year-old boys injured when they were stabbed outside a Bronx McDonald’s on Wednesday — and then the tragic knifing of Sara Rivera, 17, in Sunnyside at around 9:35 p.m.
“There is always talk about too many guns on the street, and there are-but it seems like every teen has a knife,” a Brooklyn detective said of what appears to be a trend of knife crimes among teens.
“You think you are getting punched and all of a sudden you are bleeding because someone stabbed you in the chest or back.”
Police officials also blamed the state’s lax criminal justice laws for the violence, while noting a recent increase in gun arrests among the city’s youth.
“This is a direct result from the ‘Raise the Age’ laws,” one Manhattan supervisor said, referring to a statute signed by former Gov. Andrew Cuomo which upped the age for a teen to face adult charges to 18, from the previous 16- and 17-year-old threshold.
The law, which went into effect in 2019, makes it likely that 16- and 17-year-olds suspects get funneled through Family Court, where they face less serious consequences.
“There are no repercussions for the crimes. The increase in crime is the opposite effect of what the law was intended to do,” the supervisor said of the slap-on-the-wrist system, adding it was creating “super criminals.”
NYPD Chief of Crime Control Strategies Mike Lipetri, agreed, telling The Post on Friday, “we have to have consequences” for serious crimes.
Last year, Lipetri said, 11% of gun arrests were minors, “up 120 % from 2018 when it was 209 under [the] age of 18.”
He said NYPD data shows that about one-quarter of youths arrested with guns in 2021 went on to be a perpetrator or victim of a shooting within two years.
“Eleven percent of all shooting victims last year in New York City were under the age of 18. Up 77% from 2018,” he added.
Some 96 people under the age of 18 were arrested in shootings in 2023, Lipetri said, adding that number was “up 92% from 2018.”
The frightening statistics played out in real time in the 36 hours after Brown was killed. As of Friday, no suspects had been publicly identified in his murder.
No suspect was named either in the shooting of the 17-year-old boy at NYCHA’s Amsterdam Houses, which erupted during a dispute over a dice game, police said.
Cops have not announced arrests in the Tuesday slashings, including the 15-year-old boy stabbed in the back of the head during a scuffle with other teens on an MTA bus in the Bronx, according to police, who said the attackers fled the scene.
Two other teens, of the same age, were also injured at a South Williamsburg intersection later that day, and that case is ongoing, too, according to police.
Police are also still searching for the attacker who knifed a 15-year-old boy in the chest and slashed the other in the hand outside the McDonalds in Charlotte Gardens just before 4 p.m. Wednesday. The two boys are students at Bronx Vision Academy.
A 15-year-old girl was charged in the murder of Rivera – who was just a few months from turning 18.
A friend of Rivera’s said the teen was drinking with pals in a park near the 46th Street subway station when she got into the fatal dispute with the 15-year-old acquaintance — both students at Queens Tech High School, who had only been friends for about three weeks, Kenny said.
“They begin to get into some kind of verbal interaction, where you suddenly just see the perpetrator just lunge at the victim, stabs her in the neck,” he said of the Wednesday tragedy.
“While the victim was lying in the street dying, she was asking for someone to please call her mother.”
The high schooler was rushed to a hospital, but could not be saved.
“This is what happens when you change the laws and there are no consequences,” another Brooklyn detective chimed in.
“Lawmakers think they are protecting teens-did they protect [Rivera]?”
Hinds, the Brooklyn pastor who knew tragic hoopster, Brown, agreed.
“There’s a need for comprehensive resources,” he said. “An all-hands-on-deck approach.”
